Much follows from the blindness I am describing. Much about the experience of being a mother falls silently out of the public eye – since seeing oneself depends at least partly on being recognised by others – and out of the range of what many mothers can bear to know or think about themselves. The implications in the realm of social policy are profound, certainly in the UK and US, where the punishing expectations on mothers, especially in the teeth of social inequality, reach particularly gruelling heights. In 1998, Melissa Benn argued that post-feminism, ‘self-contained to the point of arrogance’, had slammed the lid back on the demands and painful emotions of motherhood that had been opened up by 1970s feminism (the wrong kind of containment, we might say).23
When Estela Welldon described as ‘maternal perversion’ the violent acts that some mothers commit against their children in Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (1988), her book was banned in feminist bookshops. She was seen as blaming mothers for any damage to their children. But Welldon’s point was that refusal to acknowledge this ‘dark side’ of mothering meant abandoning such women to unacknowledged distress and their children to potential danger. No one, she observed, seemed to understand these women as mothers: ‘“women” were seen as capable of such actions, but not “mothers”.’24 Her book was therefore a plea for tolerance and understanding, although those terms are perhaps a bit soggy liberal when what is involved is more like dropping the scales from our eyes. For Welldon, a mother’s perversion was the consequence of the abuse or neglect she will have suffered at the hands of her own mother, and most likely her mother’s mother before her (a twisted version of Woolf’s injunction to ‘Think back through the grandmothers’). Instead of idealising and denigrating motherhood, social policy and psychological understanding need, therefore, to give motherhood its deserved but mostly refused place ‘at the centre of human difficulty’ (Juliet Mitchell in the foreword of the 1992 edition). Interestingly, the mothers in Welldon’s study alternately idealised and cherished, then ravaged and discarded their children. Like the Stepford wives, robots who perform the patriarchal fantasy of the suburban wife to the letter, they were silently miming and reflecting back onto society the twin poles – unworldly expectation and rage – of its own inane, crippling vision, and treatment, of mothers.
Evidence suggests, especially in its dealings with such hard cases, that social work is not immune to the same problem. Not least because social work as a profession is dominated by women, many of whom will be mothers themselves. ‘Surprisingly little attention,’ writes Brid Featherstone, professor of social work, ‘has been paid to the fact that when mothers neglect, beat, suffocate, kill or sexually abuse their child/children, it is often another woman, who herself may be a mother and certainly has been a daughter, who is involved in investigating, assessing and working with her and her family.’25 Whether as mother or daughter or both, a social worker is just as likely as anyone else to have been caught in the same emotional straitjacket, the same instructions as to what she must and must not feel (perhaps even more so, since entering one of the caring professions and taking care of other people’s problems can also be a way of avoiding one’s own).
A mother who admits to sexual desire for her own child can, for example, throw the whole professional network into disarray, especially when it is impossible to predict with any certainty whether such a mother is more or less likely to enact her feelings and actually abuse her child. The social worker listening to her may be appalled, but also find herself envying this woman’s freedom to speak her mind. In one case, a social worker became enraged against a depressed mother who had asked for her son to be taken into care, finding herself denouncing her in the very language of stigma from which she thought herself immune and from which she should have been protecting her client, only to discover she was having her own fantasies of hitting the child: ‘That a woman social worker might want to hit a child, particularly a vulnerable child who had been rejected by his mother, was quite literally unthinkable.’26
‘What woman,’ Adrienne Rich asks in the final chapter in Of Woman Born (‘Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness’), ‘has not dreamed of “going over the edge”?’27 The chapter opens with the story of a mother who murdered two of her eight children in Chicago in 1974. This was the chapter Rich insisted on keeping in her book, despite the feminist requests for her to drop it. Perhaps the most radical, and for some unacceptable, thing about it was just this call for empathy: ‘What woman has not…?’ to which ‘What mother would dream of such a thing?’ may well be the knee-jerk response. Instead, Rich is asking all women, wherever they find themselves, to make a leap of imagination into the life of a profoundly disturbed woman with too many children, not one of whom was wanted, stranded in a suburb of Chicago, with no household help or any respite, who was seen by her neighbours as the model of the devoted mother (Rich does suggest that, had help been on offer, she may well have refused to take it).
We must, she writes, reckon fully with the ‘ambiguities of our being … with the potentialities for both creative and destructive energies in each of us’ – words from the first edition that she reprints in italics in the preface to the later edition of her book.28 She is issuing a cry for universal solidarity. She is asking women to see themselves in an act that most people, women, mothers – for good reason – cannot bear to contemplate. She is asking mothers to imagine, if only for a moment, that this dreadful story could have been their own. This is to enjoin on mothers a very specific ethical task, that of envisaging themselves as the person they would most hate to be. Never turn away – being socially inclusive follows from a willingness inside the heart to hold on, however painful, to everything. No mother is alien. We could not be further from where this book started – a world that finds it acceptable to turn back, and then target for special hatred, refugee mothers in flight from the attrition of their lives: ‘Let them drown.’
* * *
She is the mother of all feminists, certainly from the mid-twentieth century in the West, one of the ‘unchilded’ women, to use Rich’s phrase, without whom so many women would be suffering spiritual malnutrition. In de Beauvoir’s eyes, becoming a mother is for a woman the most fundamental alienation of her freedom, certainly in the unequal world as it then was in the middle of the last century, and is still in so many ways today. For some 1970s feminists, partly taking, or thinking to take, their cue from her, not being a mother became a mantra: don’t have children; if you do, pray for a girl, and whatever you do, make sure you bring up your child in a commune. To say that motherhood is, at moments, a hateful prospect for de Beauvoir is an understatement (although she never instructed women not to become mothers). But hate, as should be clear by now, is a form of energy, never so destructive for mothers, indeed for anyone, as when it is internally silenced or unthought. I end this chapter with Simone de Beauvoir, not just because her influence can be felt to this day but because she provides one of the strongest instances, in relation to mothers, of the generative force of antipathy.
De Beauvoir’s image of motherhood suffers no piety. There is not the faintest chance she could be accused of promoting motherhood as ideal. She does not tell women how to be mothers (she does not tell women how to be anything). In de Beauvoir’s writing, we can watch as motherhood is first measured against the goals of existential thought, key philosophy of the modern Western world, where it is found pitifully wanting. For existentialism, to be human is to craft the project of one’s own life without impediment, a vision of existence that, it would be fair to say, could not be further from a mother’s daily lived experience and world. But if motherhood is dismissed by de Beauvoir as an affront to a full life, it then bizarrely stages a comeback, carving a hole right through the heart of her philosophy. For all her antipathy, motherhood in de Beauvoir’s thought takes us to the ethical crux of what being a mother might mean: both as a challenge to women’s autonomy and as a potential opening to the widest, uncontrollable reach of
what a human being is capable of.
When a woman becomes a mother, she loses her freedom. To this familiar plaint – versions of which have been scattered throughout this book – de Beauvoir adds her own unique dimension. A mother is deluded: ‘alienated in her body and her social dignity’.29 She thinks she has created the being growing inside her – in fact, her baby has no regard whatsoever for the body that gestates it: ‘she does not really make the baby, the baby makes itself within her.’30 This is not another version of the womb as passive receptacle; it is definitely not siding with the Greek story of fathers as sole generators of the embryo. But from the moment she conceives, a woman abdicates herself in favour of species being, she becomes part of a biological cycle over which she exerts no control. This reality ‘devours’ her; de Beauvoir thus neatly transposes to the felt experience of mothers an epithet – devouring mother – so often hurled against them.
In existential philosophy, the only viable existence is one that has achieved transcendence through its own activity. It is sheer degradation to be ruled by the contingencies of life. Giving birth, breastfeeding, even rearing children from infancy to adolescence, cannot be graced with the status of ‘activities’ (that would be news to most mothers). They engage no project – ‘project’ and ‘activity’ being key terms of self-affirmation in the existential lexicon.31 ‘A woman must choose,’ de Beauvoir writes, ‘between asserting her transcendence [as subject] and her alienation as an object.’32 Her view of motherhood is a protest: ‘the woman trapped in her home cannot found her existence for herself.’33 It is also the logical effect of her philosophical intent: to make humans take the risk of freedom, and be fully accountable for the path they choose to forge through their lives. After all, it is indeed true that, if your vision of being in the world is one of untrammelled self-realisation, motherhood is a bit of a shock, to say the least. But that just might be, as de Beauvoir’s account of mothering starts to suggest almost in spite of itself, because there is something wrong with the vision.
One is not born, one becomes a woman – her pronouncement is still seen as indispensable to feminism to this day: if you only become a woman, then what it means to be a woman becomes negotiable. Under the right political conditions, you can un-become her too, you can shed the requisite role and make yourself. Perhaps the sole exception to this truth of womanhood is that moment of blind necessity when, out of the body of a woman, something is being born. But if motherhood lashes you to species being, there is nonetheless always the danger that a mother will come to think of her baby as her doing, her creation, and, one short step, her property. She will expect too much of her child, in the belief that motherhood has endowed her life with meaning, ushering her into true being, which means in existential philosophy, conscious, sentient, being ‘for itself’. Seen in this light, motherhood may foster the illusion of self-creation, a belief that the whole world pours, on command, out of ourselves. In fact, a baby is no more than a ‘gratuitous proliferation’ of brute matter whose ‘pure contingency’ is on a par with death.34
This sounds as bleak as can be. And yet, already we might see how this disquieting proposition might be turned, imaginatively, on its head. Having a baby brings a mother up against mortality. It puts her in touch with what, in every single human, cannot be self-fashioned or subdued to purpose. At the very moment a mother appears to be acquiring a new power she immediately has to cede it. She owns but does not own. She engenders a life only in so far as it escapes. The only question is whether this means a woman is better off not being a mother, although de Beauvoir never in fact says as much; or whether knowledge of this could instead open a path to what a mother might be (and not just on behalf of her baby or herself). De Beauvoir is clear that, in the present unequal social arrangements, organised by and to the advantage of men, mothers and their infants are under serious threat. A mother cannot secure the life of the child who is placed – sanctimoniously, thoughtlessly, mostly without material or practical support – in her total care: ‘The great danger in which our way of life places the child, is that the mother to whom she or he is confined hand over foot is nearly always an unsatisfied woman … once we understand how far the present situation of women obstructs her fulfilment … we shudder that defenceless children are abandoned to her.’35
De Beauvoir’s view of mothering as experience is not all dark. She talks of ecstasy, of some mothers’ sense of fulfilment, of joy (a topic central in what follows here). In fact, alongside Winnicott, she deserves recognition as the first writer to speak out on maternal ambivalence (The Second Sex and his essay were published in the same year). Again on pregnancy:
Pregnancy is a drama played out for the woman between self and self, one which she experiences both as enriching and as a mutilation: the foetus is part of her body, and at the same time a parasite exploiting her; she possesses, and is possessed by it; it contains her whole future and, bearing it inside herself, she feels as vast as the world; but this very richness annihilates her, and she feels she is nothing.36
De Beauvoir, indeed existential philosophy, is famously critical of psychoanalysis. From the outset, she insists that her vision of women’s destiny, based on choice and freedom, is at odds with the psychoanalytic view of humans unconsciously driven and torn between conflicting desires.37 But she also knows that becoming a mother is an experience that plunges a woman into the deepest recesses of herself. All mothers were once daughters. Whatever their situation, all mothers are likely to find themselves reliving at least fragments of their own experience as a child. In this domain of partly welcome, partly unwelcome involuntary recall, no woman – especially not in a world that effectively weds a mother to her daughter – is likely to be given an easy ride:
It is when the little girl grows up that the true conflicts are born: we saw how she wants to assert her own autonomy against her mother: in her mother’s eyes, this is the sign of hateful ingratitude; she sets herself against this will that escapes her; she cannot accept her double becoming an other. The pleasure tasted by men in relation to women: of feeling absolutely superior, a woman only ever feels in relation to her children, especially her daughters … Regardless of whether she is passionately enthused or hostile, the independence of her child is the ruin of her own hopes.38
How can a mother avoid the temptation to abuse her privileges, since to do so she would have to be either perfectly happy or a saint? What is a mother meant to do when confronted with the possibility of the child’s own freedom – which must mean freedom from her mother? Most likely, for de Beauvoir, she will resist with all her might, thereby repeating, although probably without knowing it, the worst of her own destiny in a patriarchal world. She becomes like a man – supreme irony – who uses woman as the means to his self-realisation. She has made the fatal mistake of thinking that she could create her own being on the back of someone else’s (this is what a man is). As commentators have pointed out, de Beauvoir is clearly describing her struggles with her own mother – like Edith Wharton in the last chapter, de Beauvoir makes her bid for freedom out of a time of war. Like Wharton, she is charting the emotional history, the psychic fallout of a moment that laid an impossible injunction on women as mothers: be everything and nothing, be life and death for your child.
But if a mother is being asked for too much; if her daughter’s freedom can only be asserted at the cost of her own; if life and death are joined in an interminable struggle at the core of her being, then the idea of pure, rational self-affirmation starts to look like a delusion. Caught between ‘narcissism and altruism, dream, authenticity and bad faith, devotion and cynicism’, being a mother is a ‘strange compromise’ (the inclusion of the dream suggests a condition suspended between the conscious and unconscious mind). Torn between these competing poles, how can motherhood be expected to contain itself? As it swerves from moment to moment, how can the experience of being a mother not act as a reminder of the fragile dispensation of hearts and minds and life? How many mothers find themselves t
hinking, even if without saying it out loud, that if they can only get through – if only they and their baby can survive – the next ten minutes or seconds, everything will be just fine (a claim, or plea, as urgent as it is frantic and mostly unheard)?
Motherhood is not knowledge or control. It may have to make non-stop decisions, but not according to some fatuous logic of mastery. If a mother struggling with her daughter is likely to find herself miming the worst of masculinity in a patriarchal world, at the same time she knows, de Beauvoir also tells us, that it falls to her as a mother to cede the limits of her own freedom. I remember my sister Gillian once saying when we were imagining a future as mothers, that, powerful women as we liked to see ourselves (we were barely in our twenties), once we became mothers we would have to know how to relinquish our power. She couldn’t have been more right, although it is a source of endless sadness to me that she only knew me as a mother for less than a year before she died. What I think she was also saying is that the pleasure a mother takes in her child must be oblique, somewhat askew, if she is to avoid the trap of asking – from herself, from her child – too much. ‘A mother who dreams of attaining through her child a fullness, warmth and value she has not managed to create for herself is headed for the greatest disappointment,’ de Beauvoir writes. ‘The child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without reversion to herself, seeks to go beyond her own experience.’39 This is not masochism: you must suffer for your child. It is not a plea for altruism: always put your child first. It is a way of desiring the happiness of someone other – who happens to be your child – without placing that happiness in the service of your own ego (giving with one hand and taking back with the other). It is a way of being inhabited by the other. Despite de Beauvoir’s objections, this would also be a very good working definition of the psychoanalytic unconscious.
Mothers Page 10
